The DfE policy paper “Every child achieving and thriving” dropped in early 2026. You may have read this and started planning out your enrichment offering for the new academic year. You’ll have planned around five key areas of enrichment: Civic Engagement; Arts and Culture; Nature, Outdoor and Adventure; Sport and Physical Activities; and Developing Wider Life Skills. Many sources (including us!) will have referred to these as “the five benchmarks.”
In June 2026, the DfE published its enrichment framework for schools and colleges. This advised enrichment leaders to focus around eight enrichment benchmarks. What happened to the five?
The good news is, they’re still there. They have been moved, however. They now sit inside a single benchmark – Benchmark 2. It’s important to make the distinction because to focus on just ‘the five’, means you’re missing out on covering seven other benchmarks. You might think you’ve got a plan but it’s only one eighth complete.
What Benchmark 2 Says
Benchmark 2 is “A broad and well-rounded enrichment offer”. The DfE describes it as “Pupils and students have multiple and varied opportunities” to take part in enrichment that is “purposeful and fun.”
Key to this is indicator 2.1: “Every pupil and student has access to a range of activities including at a minimum the following 5 categories.” Those five categories, together with DfE-provided examples are:
- Civic Engagement – volunteering, debating, school and college democracy, community engagement.
- Arts and Culture – taking part in and having live experience of music, art, dance, theatre, other expressive arts, visits to museums and galleries.
- Nature, Outdoors and Adventure – time outdoors, climate education and sustainability projects, gardening, residentials and camps.
- Sport and Physical Activities – participating in individual and team sports, physical activities like dance, fitness activities or cycling, representing the school or college, attending live events.
- Developing Wider Life and Future Skills – digital literacy, STEM clubs, cooking, managing finances, enterprise.
Indicator 2.2 goes on to suggest that provision should take place “regularly across the year whilst recognising that there will be a range of timings, durations and access points.” It should include “at least some provision within the school and college day.”
Three Things that are Easy to Miss
Looking closely at Benchmark 2, three points are worth reflecting on:
- “Every pupil and student” – This concerns access, not the size of the enrichment offer. A school can run sixty clubs and still have pupils who can’t access the five categories. This could be due to transport, cost, caring responsibilities or just timing. The question isn’t “do we have something in each category?” It’s “can every pupil get to something in each category?”
- “At a minimum” – The five categories are a floor, not a ceiling. Lots of good provision (e.g. a chess club, a coding group or a school newspaper) fits one of them without fitting neatly. That’s ok. The point is that no category is missing or underrepresented.
- “Within the school day” – If all activities happen after school, the pupils who catch a bus home, look after siblings or work weekends are the ones who miss out. Lunchtime and timetabled provision count, and the framework encourages it.
Where does Benchmark 2 Fit with the Other Seven?
Benchmark 2 deals with breadth – what’s on offer. Most of the other benchmarks are concerned with what happens next: whether the offer is accessible and engaging (Benchmark 5); whether it is outcomes-focused (Benchmark 7); and whether it keeps improving (Benchmark 8).
Here, the five categories are useful again. Once every activity is tagged to at least one category, they become headings under which you analyse participation. You can see not just that you run arts and culture provision, but who is taking part (as well as who isn’t).
Is Any of this Compulsory?
No. The framework is non-statutory guidance. Ofsted’s inspection toolkit from September 2026 refers to it “where applicable.” This is not a hard requirement. We covered this in more detail in our earlier post, Are the Enrichment Benchmarks Mandatory?
Our view is that the framework is still worth taking seriously; not because of inspection, but because it’s a sensible description of what a good enrichment offer looks like. Most schools we talk to were already try to cover most of it.
A Quick Check You Can do this Half Term
You don’t need software to make a start. I’d suggest the following checklist:
List every activity you ran last term. Include clubs, trips, teams, one-off events and lunchtime groups.
Tag each one to its main category. Some will fit more than one; pick one that best describes it.
Look for gaps. Is one category thin or only available to one year group?
Look at who took part. Can you see participation for your Pupil Premium, SEND, FSM and EAL pupils, category by category?
Think about timing. How much of each category happens during the school day?
The first three usually take an afternoon. The fourth and fifth are where most schools get stuck. This is because attendance records and the pupil characteristics live in different places.
Where Avalon Achieve® Comes in
This is part of what we built Avalon Achieve® for. Every activity can be tagged to its category. Attendance registers can be taken on any device. Because Avalon Achieve® reads from your MIS each night, participation can be filtered by SEND, Pupil Premium, FSM and EAL without a spreadsheet in sight. Finding the answer to “which of our disadvantaged pupils haven’t done anything in the arts this term?” is a report, not a project.
Want to Go Further?
We’re running a free 60-minute webinar on the eight enrichment benchmarks on Thursday 5th November at 4pm, with practical examples from schools already doing this. If you can’t make it live, register and we’ll send you the recording. Book your place here.
If you’d like a quick idea of where your school stands, take our enrichment readiness quiz. It only takes a few minutes.
